So, it has come to this: Chris reviews TWILIGHT

Yeah, I've read Twilight, the first novel of Stephenie Meyer's vampire series that has sold bazillions of copies and is now threatening us with a second motion picture. Even though I'm hardly the target audience for these books, I figured that it's culturally relevant enough to acquaint myself with it.And I have to report to all two of this blog's faithful readers that much...

Read More

Right now I'm watching THE SUPER HERO SQUAD SHOW

Y'all have got to check this out! It's on Cartoon Network and it's based on those cute lil' Marvel Super Hero Squad toys from Hasbro. But don't let that mislead ya: The Super Hero Squad Show is really more like Marvel Comics meets The Family Guy.What sort of funny are we talking here? Captain America was just on the phone while wearing a Confederate outfit, discussing the re-enactment he's on his way to: "Hey it's the Civil War, what's the worst...

Read More

What if the Internet was turned off?

"It's the not-to-distant future. They've turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope?"That's the grim scenario envisioned by Cracked.com, which asked its readers to send in their Photoshop-ped submissions depicting an Internet-addicted society suddenly having to make do without things like Twitter, Nigerian...

Read More

Obama declares national emergency because of swine flu

Read it here folks.That's a helluva over-reaction to something that otherwise hasn't been inordinately differently from the typical garden-variety influenza. But to hear it from some people, it's already akin to the 1918 pandemic that killed millions in a very short period of ti...

Read More

If you can find them, and no one else can help...

...maybe you can hire... The A-Team!ComingSoon.net has just posted this pic (click to significantly embiggen) of Bradley Cooper as Lt. Templeton "Faceman" Peck, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson as Sgt. "B.A." Baracus, Sharlto Copley as Capt. "Howling Mad" Murdock, and Liam Neeson as John "Hannibal" Smith - along with the team's signature van - from the upcoming film adaptation of...

Read More

N.C. State engineers create chip with storage out the wazoo

Some cutting-edge stuff coming out of North Carolina State University: researchers there have created a chip the size of a human fingernail that can store... get this... a TERABYTE of data!In layman's terms that's about 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text.The engineers made their breakthrough using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change.Working at the nanoscale,...

Read More

Nifty, Nifty: "Weird Al" Yankovic is FIFTY!

Fifty years ago today, on October 23rd 1959 in the little burg of Downey, California, proud parents Nick and Mary Yankovic celebrated the arrival of a son. They dubbed their newly-spawned offspring Alfred.A few years later a door-to-door salesman arrived at the Yankovic home in nearby Lynwood and offered either guitar or accordion lessons at a nearby school. Nick and Mary...

Read More

Man pleads guilty on charge of drunk-driving his La-Z-Boy

62-year-old Dennis LeRoy Anderson has rigged his La-Z-Boy recliner with a lawnmower motor, stereo and cup holders for his beer. Last year following drinking "eight or nine beers" Anderson crashed his... thing... into a parked car after leaving a bar in Duluth, Minnesota.Anderson has now plead guilty to a DWI charge. The judge has sentenced him to two years of probation.(That...

Read More

Understanding Einstein's energy

Energy Tribune has a BRILLIANT essay by William Tucker about Albert Einstein's classic equation E=mc2: the formula describing the interchangeability between mass and energy. Tucker's essay not only lays out E=mc2 in terms that anyone can easily grasp, it also argues why current efforts at renewable energy are not sufficient. Instead, Tucker lays out a solid case - using...

Read More

Awright, 'fess up y'all

How many poor saps out there were waiting in line at midnight to buy a copy of the Windows 7 operating syst...

Read More

Claudville, Virginia gets first public white-space network

The town of Claudville in Patrick County, Virginia - a place where I have lots of ancestral roots - is the launching site of the much-awaited white-space network technology! Described as "Wi-Fi on steroids", white-space allows for much more bandwidth over larger areas. A bunch of it just got freed-up from switchover to digital television transmission earlier this year (what,...

Read More

Gears of War Snuggie

Epic Games PR lass Dana Cowley has Twitter-ed about the latest creation from Epic's studio a few towns over in Cary: a prototype Gears of War snuggie! Yes, you can now wrap yourself in luxurious warmth and the body armor of legendary COG hero Marcus Fenix... all at once!Ehhhh... personally I'd rather have official Gears of War Underoos ...

Read More

It's that time of year again

And if you buy extra boxes of chocolate chip, the Girls Scouts will even give "protection" for your place of busine...

Read More

Russia watches American "Self Immolation"

'Tis painfully ironic that these observations are being made in Pravda, of all places. Stanislav Mishin writes...It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course,...

Read More

BATMAN & ROBIN is the most important comic book movie ever

So sayeth Marvel's president Kevin Feige... and it's pretty hard to disagree with his logic. 1997's fourth and final installment of the original Batman film franchise, notes Feige, "was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things. It created the opportunity to do X-Men and Spider-Man, adaptations that respected the source material and adaptations that were not campy."...

Read More

What the...?!?

Sesame Street has spoofed AMC's Mad Men?!?Considering that once upon a time Sesame Street did a parody of Twin Peaks starring Cookie Monster, can't really say that I'm surprised Children's TelevisionSesame Workshop would also adapt what is currently one of television's hottest shows for pee-wee appreciation :-)Next month begins Sesame Street's fortieth season. Wonder if they could do a send-up of House or Lost sometime...

Read More

Sequoia accidentally releases source code for its voting machines!

I absolutely hate, hate, HATE the very idea of electronic voting. Cannot say nearly enough rotten about it. I've no doubt that a lot of our more recent elections have been compromised and rigged - one way or another - by paperless tabulation. In a saner age, enough Americans would have gotten honked-off enough to have marched on the corporate headquarters of Diebold and...

Read More